How to check if ChatGPT cites your website

Cited or just mentioned?

Two different things can happen. ChatGPT can mention your brand, naming it in the text of an answer, or it can cite your website, listing a page on your domain among the sources it answered from. A brand can be mentioned without a link, and a page can be cited without the brand being named. Count them separately, because they need different fixes: a mention with no citation often means the model knows you but is not linking to any page of yours. Vantage's check_prompt_coverage reports the two separately for this reason.

Method 1: check by hand

This costs nothing and shows you the exact wording of the answer you are competing with.

1. Write 10 to 20 questions. Use what a buyer would type, not your brand name: "best project management software", "asana alternatives", "how to reduce churn". Asking about your own brand tells you little.
2. Turn on web search in ChatGPT, so the answer is built from live pages and lists sources. An answer from memory has no sources to check.
3. Ask each question and open the source list. Note the exact pages, not only the domains.
4. Record two columns per question: is your brand named in the text, and is a page on your domain in the sources.
5. Repeat next month. One run is a snapshot, so keep the same question list and compare.

It works, but it is slow, and it is hard to keep consistent from one month to the next.

Method 2: use the free check

Vantage's free citation check asks ChatGPT a keyword for you and shows the answer, the websites it answered from, and the measurable shape of the opening (list or sentence, how many words, whether it contains a number). It needs no account, email or card, and every keyword already checked has its own page you can read, such as best project management software.

It does not check your own domain. It shows who ChatGPT cites for a keyword, which is the same for everyone asking. That is useful for seeing what you are up against before you write anything.

Method 3: check your own domain from your coding agent

The Vantage MCP server does the hand method for you, inside Claude Code, Cursor or any MCP client. After adding it with a free key, ask something like:

Use Vantage to check which of these keywords cite example.com in ChatGPT:
"best project management software" and "asana alternatives".
My brand is Example.

check_prompt_coverage answers with a coverage percentage, the keywords where you are cited, the keywords where you are not (the list to act on), the domains that are cited instead, and any keywords where you are named but not linked. It costs one unit per keyword, and the free plan has 30 units a month. When you find a keyword you are missing, analyze_citation_gap compares one of your pages with the winning answer and lists what differs.

What seven ChatGPT answers looked like

These are the seven answers saved by Vantage's free check, measured in September 2026: one run each, ChatGPT with web search, United States, English. It is a small sample from one tool, not a benchmark, so read it as an illustration.

• All seven answers opened with a sentence, not a list. The openings ran from 5 to 26 words, with a median of 13.
• Four of the seven had a number in the opening (a price, a count or a rating), and three did not.
• Each answer drew on 2 to 5 websites, with 3 the most common.
• In six of the seven, the cited sites included the product maker's own website (Asana, ClickUp, Bitwarden, Insight Timer, Zoho and others). The exception was workout trackers, where all four cited sites were publications.

What this does and does not show: it describes what these cited answers looked like. It does not show that opening with a short sentence, or being a product's maker, causes a citation.

If ChatGPT is not citing you

1. Make sure OpenAI's search crawler can reach you. OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot is the crawler for ChatGPT's search results and that sites opted out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot is a separate setting for model training, so you can allow one and disallow the other. Check your robots.txt, and note that OpenAI says changes can take about 24 hours to take effect. The details are in OpenAI's crawler documentation.
2. Open the page with a short, direct answer. Every one of the seven answers above opened that way, with a sentence of about 13 words at the median. Run analyze_citation_gap on the keyword to see the specific differences between your page and the answer.
3. Look at who is cited instead. For the keywords you are missing, the cited domains are the sites ChatGPT already trusts for that question. If they are review sites or directories, being listed or reviewed there is part of the job.

Common questions

Can Google Search Console show ChatGPT citations?

No. Search Console reports Google Search only, so ChatGPT citations never appear there.

Does ChatGPT send traffic when it cites you?

Sometimes. When someone clicks a cited link, the visit can show up in your analytics as a referral from chatgpt.com. A citation nobody clicks still counts as visibility, so referral traffic understates how often you are cited.

How often should I re-check?

Monthly is enough for most sites. Keep the same list of questions so the numbers are comparable, and use analyze_citation_trend to see the month-by-month count for your domain.

Does this work for Perplexity or Gemini?

The by-hand method does. Vantage's tools cover ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, not Perplexity or Gemini, because the data provider does not offer them for these checks.

Try it

Run the free check for a keyword you care about, or get a free key (30 checks a month, no card) to check your own domain. All seven tools are listed in the tools reference, and other tools that do similar things are compared on the comparison page.